Astrozeitgeist Update

Up until recently there has been an embarrassment of aspects in the sky, in the sense of so many different things going on from Jupiter outwards that it has been hard to know what to say: Jupiter opposite Saturn, conjunct Uranus and square Pluto; Saturn opposite Uranus and square Pluto; Uranus square Pluto; and Neptune conjunct Chiron. All the planets from Saturn outwards (including Chiron) making hard aspects with one or more of the others. Phenomenal.

Moreover, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Pluto all came together as a t-square this summer at the beginning of the cardinal signs to create what Lynn Hayes called the ‘Cardinal Drama’. It was a time for powerful new beginnings such as we will not see again in our lifetimes. I saw a lot of it happening in the lives of myself and my friends. Anything major that you began this summer has a significance that you cannot begin to understand yet.

And this was the same on the world stage. Admittedly I was left scratching my head this summer, thinking well everything seems to be carrying on as usual, where’s the Cardinal Drama? But as I said, it was about beginnings whose significance we may not see for a long time, we may not even know they were beginnings. But there were a number of shifts: the BP oil spill, which may effect oil policy profoundly in the long term – or ought to – or it may just be bad news for BP; the war of the West, led by the US, against Islamism seems in Afghanistan to have shifted towards an acknowledgement that the Taleban, the arch enemy, have to be negotiated with; and Pakistan, a nuclear-armed country under pressure from the Islamists, has slipped further into crisis.

Politically, we have seen in the US the rise into electoral credibility of a quite extreme right-wing charismatically-led movement, the Tea Party. Economically, the recession has not gone away, turning it into the much-feared ‘double-dip’ recession. All the above events may come, with hindsight, to be seen as tipping points that occurred around the Cardinal Drama.

We seem to be in what has aptly been called The Great Recession, and this fits with Pluto’s presence in Capricorn since the western economies went into crisis. Pluto governs wealth and power, both of which have their basis in the economy, and Capricorn is neither boom nor bust. So the boom went, but we did not have a Depression, which is the opposite extreme. Capricorn wants realism, an honest day’s work, and we will continue to have a hangover until we have paid for the party and wealth is again based on productivity rather than on financial engineering, debt and inflated house prices. There is no sense at the moment that a different model is going to come about: just the old model but with a return to some older rules for the bankers to stop the same crisis occurring again.

For now. Because Uranus is starting to square Pluto, we cannot expect just to sit out this recession and see a return to the old prosperity that had been basically uninterrupted since World War II. This is the Great Recession. Something very different is coming in, a new economic era. We are collectively expecting a return to the old prosperity, but that is not what is going to happen. The astrology clearly tells us otherwise. The one thing you can be certain of with astrology is that hard outer planet aspects mean big change. You can even say quite a lot about the nature of that change. What you don’t know is where that change will take you in the inner and outer events of your life. If you did know, you wouldn’t be able to live the change. And it’s the same now on a collective level with Uranus and Pluto, which will not exactly square until 2012.

The Saturn-Uranus opposition lasted for 2 years and finished in August 2010. Coinciding in its very early phase with Pluto’s entry into Capricorn, and with Saturn ruling Capricorn, it explains why Pluto’s entry into Capricorn was economically so dramatic and unsettling. Normally you would expect a gradual manifestation over some years of Pluto’s presence in a sign: indeed, we still have that to come with Pluto in Capricorn - we haven’t yet seen his true influence there yet!

Saturn-Uranus oppositions and conjunctions seem to invariably coincide with dramatic and revolutionary change, which is in the nature of Uranus when it gets its chance through the manifesting, shaping nature of Saturn. The conjunction in 1988/89 saw the USSR coming to an end; and the opposition of 1965/66 saw the enactment of civil rights legislation in the US, liberalising measures in the UK, and the era of protests. With the world’s financial system almost collapsing, we have certainly also been through a period of dramatic change; but with the Uranus square Pluto following hard on its heels, Saturn-Uranus may come economically to be seen as preparatory rather than as the full change itself. Politically, Saturn-Uranus has the seen the election of the first black President in the US as well as revolutionary healthcare legislation, however watered down; and in the UK we have seen the first coalition government since the Second World War.

Saturn has been squaring Pluto since last autumn, and will finish next month. Hard aspects between Saturn and Pluto usually coincide with a swing to the right in US politics: the empowerment (Pluto) of conservatism (Saturn). The conjunction of 1982, for example, saw the rise of Reaganism; the opening square of 1993/4 saw the Republicans under Newt Gingrich take control of Congress; and the opposition of 2001 saw George W Bush come to power. Under the present square we have seen the rise of the Tea Party, representing a particularly strong swing to the right. In the UK, the Conservatives have gained power for the first time in 13 years.

In Germany, as I write, the usually moderate Angela Merkel has said that multiculturalism does not work, that different races cannot live happily side by side. (This is also part of a new assertiveness by Germany, as Pluto comes up to square its Sun and MC.) At the same time, we have seen France expelling gypsies, to widespread condemnation by other members of the EU.

Pluto is also coming up to square France’s Sun. Both of these events represent new right-leaning trends that we would not have seen happening a few years ago – they are not just me picking out events that happen to describe Saturn-Pluto, which you can always find!

There has been a Jupiter-Uranus conjunction since April 2010 that will finish in February 2011. It has been taking place in late Pisces/early Aries. Jupiter expands whatever it touches. Uranus means many things, but scientific progress is one of them, so these conjunctions are usually periods of scientific breakthrough. This has been particularly noticeable in astronomy, with all sorts of new telescopes coming on line, both ground-based and spaced-based, and lots of new discoveries being made about the wider universe.

Particularly interesting is the possibility of life-as-we-know-it being discovered on other planets. Astronomers have just discovered the first ‘Goldilocks’ planet, which is similar in size to the earth and at such a distance from its Sun that it is neither too hot nor too cold for liquid water and therefore it is ‘just right’ for life as we know it to exist. You can tell the type of elements and chemicals existing on the surface of a planet by the wavelengths of light coming off, so it would only seem to be a matter of time before a Goldilocks planet is discovered that gives off the signature of the type of organic chemicals that we associate with life.

It would not be a direct observation of life but a strong inference. Who knows, scientists may also see the signatures of other complex chemicals, maybe say silicon-based, that suggest not breast implants but life-not-as-we-know-it!

Discovering life elsewhere would be a huge event that would deeply change how we see the universe and our place in it. It would therefore be very appropriate if it occurred not just under a Uranus-Jupiter conjunction, but one that was taking place both at the end of Pisces (the infinite sea of life) and at the beginning of Aries, the zodiac place par excellence of new beginnings.

Uranus is also associated with lightning, so Uranus-Jupiter is associated with big lightning bolts! (Jupiter is the Roman Zeus, who wielded a thunderbolt.) With this conjunction taking place opposite the US MC at 1 Libra, the public face of the country, what could be more appropriate than the success of the photographer who waited 40 years to get this photo:

Jupiter, as king of the gods, is also a law giver, he tells us what is right and wrong, and so he is associated with ethics. There has been a square from Jupiter to Pluto (wealth and the power it gives) for much of this year, a time when legislation has been enacted in the US to curb the activities of the unscrupulous end of the financial system.

The final part of the Cardinal Drama has been the opposition between Jupiter and Saturn, which began in May 2010 and will finish next March. The Jupiter-Saturn cycle, before the discovery of the outer planets, used to be the main cycle for describing changes in the world. It is now perhaps not so clear what is its precise place in the scheme of things. There are plenty of articles on Jupiter-Saturn, but none I can find that say exactly what it means if you subtract the outer planets. It would seem there is a whole lot to think through!

Let’s speculate for a bit. Saturn and Jupiter both concern worldly rulership. Saturn is government and the laws that need to be brought in to keep society working. It is conservative. Jupiter is expansive, and it represents ethics and ideals and progress. Both planets are visible to the naked eye, so they are conscious, they represent humanity’s collective attempts to govern itself and to progress. They represent that part of collective life that we can consciously influence and be responsible for. When Pluto comes along, we have to surrender to our Fate (while remaining responsible.) With Neptune, we need to be open to some new dimension of consciousness. In both cases there is an evolution occurring that is beyond our knowing. But with Saturn and Jupiter, we are in charge. At least, sort of, and only since the outer planets came along (I’m trying not to offend the gods here!)

So we are looking at cycles of government and any conscious collective current that brings change. And we are looking at the tension between Saturn and Jupiter: between the past and the future, between the need to conserve and the need to progress, and also between natural law and human law – between human nature as law of the jungle, and human nature with its capacity for ideals.

To fully understand a hard aspect between 2 planets, you need to look at the cycle that began with their conjunction. In the case of the present opposition, the cycle began with a conjunction in Taurus in 2000. So we know immediately that the cycle has a lot to do with money (Taurus.) 2000 saw the end of the dotcom bubble, and the gradual lowering of US interest rates to offset its effects. At the same time, the US government had been pushing the big mortgage lenders to move into sub-prime lending. And there was a lot of money sloshing around the western world looking for better returns on investment that banks or shares could give. In late 1999, just before the conjunction, the US passed the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act which ‘modernised’ – i.e. deregulated – large parts of the financial industries.

So events around the conjunction of 2000 set the stage for what is happening now under the opposition. It was a case of too much Jupiter and not enough Saturn. Legislation to rein in the financial industries – Saturn - has been passed in the US under this opposition. The first half of the Jupiter-Saturn cycle is traditionally expansive, and the second half contractive, and this seems to be what is happening. And the crisis has so clearly been something of our own making, something we are responsible for and can learn from. Of course, the outer planets are also coming along and taking the whole thing somewhere else. But the Saturn-Jupiter aspect of the crisis shows humanity its own part in it: too much Jupiter in Taurus, and not enough Saturn in Taurus. And the two intertwine. Jupiter, for example, in its wish to provide poor people in the US with their own houses, did not take fully into account human nature in its natural, unreformed state (Saturn), and the fraud and the greed and the ignorance that would lead to a crisis. So Saturn also caused the crisis, because Jupiter was not properly ruling it. If one planet malfunctions, you get a contribution from the malfunctioning aspect of the other planet.